Mainly, with the below and other posts, I am attempting to fight back against the unproved contention of quants and math-y people that all knowledge is and can only be quantitative in nature.

The quant mindset misses as much as it reveals, in my opinion, and makes many truths harder to see rather than elucidating them. Also — and I do not see this as a side issue — over-mathematicalization (how do you like that word?) is designed in fields like economics to deliberately obfuscate so as to conceal bogus results and to allow otherwise-shoddy contentions, theories and conclusions to stand because the math is too complex (though obviously wrong) for most people to comprehend.

The quant view is akin to saying one cannot possibly understand how an internal combustion engine works if one cannot use quantum chemistry to determine all the interactions at an atomic level in the ignition and chemical transformation of gasoline into heat energy. Ludicrous of course, but I see a variant of this argument all the time in quant-land.

Again, I like math and wish I were better at it. But that’s largely irrelevant to the idea that quants overstate their efficacy while ignoring the vast, vast realms where their techniques and ideas (and conclusions) are inapplicable, actively harmful, or just plain wrong in hilariously obvious (except to them) ways.

I couldn’t get a degree in the field in which I currently work, due to math inability.

Even stranger, many tenured professors couldn’t now get admitted to many of the colleges where they either matriculated and/or teach. Also, many of them could not and never could have passed classes that current undergraduates are required to endure.

I like math. I enjoy reading about it. Just can’t do it. So it’s not hatred of math that motivates me to write this. But I’m not sure we’re actually building a better world by making one so math-obsessed and having that as our only allowed sorting mechanism.

Math has mostly harmed economics, not helped it. I suspect it’ll do the same to sociology soon enough.

Math people don’t understand otherwise-intelligent people who have no talent for math. They believe it’s just a matter of studying more or finding the “right” way to do it.

That, however, is like telling a color-blind person to just see color.

Yes, just see it! You’re so smart! Just see it!

Notice how well that works.

The Germans who work in my office are surprised that I can hear an Austrian accent (in someone speaking German) despite not speaking German myself.

But that’s just the sort of thing I am good at.

(To Germans, an Austrian accent implies what Americans would call a “hick.”)

It’s True: Apple is Ditching the Headphone Jack with the iPhone 7.

Looks like my next phone will be an Android, then. Fine with me.

How to Pick the Fastest Line at the Supermarket.

Some things I’ve observed, to add:

• Look for people holding checkbooks. Get out of those lines. That’s going to take a long time.

• Older cashiers and very young cashiers are slower. The fastest are non-chatty female cashiers who look older than high school but not 60+.

• Look for people holding coupons or with coupon books/folders etc. They will take a very long while to get them all out and almost always will argue over the total at the end. These lines are almost always the slowest. (And it will be 10x as slow if this is all combined with someone over 65.)

• Look at people’s fingers for nicotine stains or smell for people who smell like smoke. They often will ask for cigarettes. This typically requires a manager or a trip to the service desk. This will make the line crawl.

• Lines with women with kids are good. Kids make women clear out faster and men go slower. So, conversely, avoid lines that have men with kids.

• Avoid lines where people are buying alcohol, much un-bar-coded produce or any otherwise unusual or unlabeled item.

• Avoid lines with anyone texting, talking on a cell phone or even holding their phone. Chances are they will attempt to use it during the transaction process.

• Avoid lines with really old baggers (65+) or with managers bagging. Both are often really slow and will have you waiting after the transaction is done.

I’ll update this if I think of anything else. If it offends anyone, well, first I don’t really care and second, can’t change the facts on the ground just because you wish it were different.

Sometimes, I wish I had any skill at all for operational math. But then I think if I did, I would’ve had a really high chance of going into academia.

With apologies to friends in academia, but it pays poorly and chances are I would’ve become an adjunct and have hated my life.

So I dodged two bullets. Avoiding academia because of complete dyscalculia and inability to do anything beyond basic algebra* was the first.

The second was journalism. Even though I was a journalist and was offered a pretty good civilian journalist job at Charleston’s main daily paper in 1999, I turned it down simply because I was tired of journalism.

Being bad at math helped me make so much more money than I otherwise would have.

Being sick of journalism also saved me from a life of probable penury.

So much stupid luck involved in living.

*Though I can easily understand the concepts behind any math, and understand 100% the solution to a problem when it’s explained, just can’t work out anything myself.

The principal difference between Trump’s many scams and the rackets of the Clintons’ is that their extortions are socially-approved by neoliberalism and its connected class while Trump’s cross that line — they are too declassé, too low-rent, too blatant.

Only in Bizarro World could Democrats look at this and conclude that nothing is wrong at all with it.

Yes, sure, it’s all legal. It’s all above board. It crosses no line that matters to neoliberalism and its defenders.

But is it moral? Should we order a society this way? Should we condone a major politician’s family being allowed to take $18 million from the oh-so-venerable for-profit school industry?

Trump and Clinton are not the same. I am not arguing that. Trump (except in failing to fill his bombing-brown-people quota) would be a far worse president than Clinton.

However, pretending there’s nothing morally disgusting and indecent about their behavior and the entire system that enables it makes me wonder why it’s so important that people defend something that’s obviously wrong.

Was going to write something longer about this, but then lost the will.

If the US had any brains (which it doesn’t), it would be waging a huge PR effort to get Western European women to immigrate to the US.

Denmark is probably not inevitably doomed, but much of Western Europe is — Sweden, Germany and quite a few others will be unlivable places for Westernized women in 20-40 years.

I know it’s not polite to write about. Fortunately I am not a very polite person, so the idea that unrestricted immigration of patriarchal anti-Western Muslims into Europe is not going to have deleterious effects is just ludicrous. It can only be believed by those enmeshed in some fairy-land fantasy.

Glad the US is insulated by oceans and an enormous population.

Of course, we ourselves caused many of the problems that will cause much of Europe to be overrun by Islamic patriarchal societies, but that still doesn’t cause me to want hundreds of millions of women to suffer.

I’m strange, I know.

Fact: “The combined global workforces of Facebook, Yelp, Zynga, LinkedIn, Zillow, Tableau, Zulily, and Box are smaller than the number of people who lost their jobs when Circuit City was liquidated in 2009.”

See also: why the lump of labor fallacy is a fallacy.

How can delusional Democrats read something like this and conclude that Hillary Clinton (or anyone like her) represents their interests and values their concerns?

But Mrs. Clinton has been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the country’s most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her. In the last two weeks of August, Mrs. Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fund-raising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour, according to a New York Times tally.

And while Mrs. Clinton has faced criticism for her failure to hold a news conference for months, she has fielded hundreds of questions from the ultrarich in places like the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Beverly Hills and Silicon Valley.

And this.

Yet some of the closest relationships Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have are with their longstanding contributors. If she feels most at ease around millionaires, within the gilded bubble, it is in part because they are some of her most intimate friends.

I’m gagging over here.

I just can’t conceive of any world where people like this — who seem to genuinely believe that Clinton has their best interests at heart — can square that with her policies and behavior.

No, I don’t think Trump would make a better president and will not be voting for him.

However, there just has to be vast cognitive dissonance going on for anyone to look at the evidence before them and conclude that Clinton or anyone of her class will do anything but be a complete sellout to the ultra-rich and Wall Street banksters, and do her best to make the country worse for everyone else and better for them.

It’s completely puzzling to me how many people can be so deluded. I guess, though, that’s how politics works and perhaps must work.

I’m not with her — or anyone who wants to sell me and my nation out to the predators of society.

Took me a while to figure out Lena Dunham.

She’s a female bro. That’s all it is. An educated female bro.

That is a rare species indeed. One is rarely spotted in the wild.

The problem with this refutation is that it’s incoherent. What is the author refuting? That some people think that there was no Bering Strait? That some people believe no migration ever occurred by that route? That there was no ice-free corridor? (One of the commenters points out the same thing.)

When it’s not even possible to ascertain what your refutation is refuting, you have failed.

I believe the author is attempting to state that earlier waves of migration via other routes do not disprove that later migration occurred via the Bering Strait route.

But like many poor writers, the author cannot state the thesis outright as then it’s too easy to challenge and face-saving is impossible, so it’s buried and incomprehensible.

It bothers me when journalists write in a way that it’s clear what they mean if you know the topic very well, but is really misleading to anyone else.

Moreover, it seems that those rock-bottom low rates reflect long-term structural issues — such as ageing demographics and falling productivity — as much as central bank interventions. This suggests they could endure for a long time.

Productivity is not falling. It’s simply that the rate of increase is declining. This is not at all the same thing as a fall in productivity. Not even close!

A fall in productivity is this: yesterday, I could produce 10 widgets with 2 workers. Today, I can produce 10 widgets with 3 workers. Tomorrow, I will only be able to produce 10 widgets with 4 workers.

What the article is talking about is this: For the past 20 years, I could produce 10 widgets with 1 fewer worker every year. However, for the past five years, I could only reduce my workers by 0.4 per year to produce the same 10 widgets.

Notice that productivity is going up, just not as quickly.

Which is exactly what is happening in the economy now.

It annoys me that almost no journalists gets this right.

I’m going to watch the hell out of this movie.

What say you?

Also, we’re projected to get 4.2 inches of rain here tomorrow due to Hermine. I fear rivers overflowin’. But I don’t hear the voice of rage and ruin.